Manuela Mariotti, Dondup’s creative director, has rebellion as a guiding star. You can tell she’s a fighter, of the I-don’t-budge-if-you-push type—gentle yet quite inexorable. She is also a die-hard idealist; and in a world that seems more and more dry and depleted of a nurturing driving force, Mariotti sounds both refreshing and honest. Yet she’s not in the least a naive version of Pippi Longstocking—for all her idealism and rebel heart, she has been able to transform Dondup from a small denim producer smack in the middle of Italian nowhere into a brand with a strong following. It certainly takes guts to achieve such a success—apparently, Mariotti has that in spades.
For Fall, she obviously started from her favorite subject, which is embracing the youthful spirit of positive rebellion against the status quo, incarnated in multiple variations: grunge, punk, new wave, underground and street subculture, ’80s hard clubbing, garage bands, new romantics, pacifism, and so on. This season she added a sort of spiritual element to the already crowded mix: “I called this collection Cosmic Punk,” said Mariotti. “I believe in the power of individual expression that can bring about change through love. A new renaissance achieved through energy, not destructive but creative.”
To come down to more mundane matters (i.e., fashion), a message of such epic proportions somehow coalesced into a cohesive, compact lineup. Oversize velvet tuxedos referred to the masculine-feminine, gender-bending mystique; pierced biker jackets were worn with ruffled long romantic dresses; silver safety pins and diamanté chains held together kilts with raw hems. A touch of the futurist was thrown in for good measure, as in a silver laminated T-shirt with extra-elongated sleeves paired with a matching brassiere and pleated full-length skirt. “ ‘Space Oddity,’ ” said Mariotti of the outfit, paying her own personal heartfelt homage to the most stylish artist that ever existed, the supremely great Mr. Bowie.
